Abstract
In the spring of 2020, when the entire education system worldwide switched to distance learning, parents became key learning agents, helping students to understand how to continue learning, how to use digital solutions and how to support students in this process. This article summarizes parents’ views on the distance learning process and the challenges they faced. This is part of a larger study carried out within the project “Life with COVID-19: Evaluation of the overcoming coronavirus crisis in Latvia and recommendations for social resilience in the future” (CoLife), which was launched in Latvia in the summer of 2020 and analyzed what digital learning tools schools can use to support students in their learning. Parents’ views on 738 school-age children (313 responses about 1st–4th graders; 362 responses for 5th–9th graders and 63 responses for 10th–12th graders) were obtained, and the main conclusions were that after parents became learning agents, they would have liked more support from educators to understand how to support their children in the learning process. Parents would also have liked schools to be interested in how their children are doing and whether everything necessary is available. Overall, it can be concluded that in this crisis, parents tried to support their children, and in most cases, it was the mothers of the students who provided this support, but it was primarily based on the need to use digital technologies, which means that children whose parents do not use digital technologies may be more exposed to the danger of falling into a risk group with larger educational gaps.
Highlights
Introduction and BackgroundPublisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a large number of educational institutions were closed, and education was transposed to remote learning, reaching the level of the complete closure of schools in 130 countries on 31 March 2020; educational institutions were partially open in four countries, fully open in two countries (Turkmenistan and Belarus), and in all other countries, an academic break started [1]
There was a shock in general education, where until now learning had traditionally been organized as a face-to-face learning process, in which students learn under the guidance of a teacher, as, in a few days, this learning process had to be transformed into remote education [2], and the concept of “homeschooling”, from its prior understanding of being a way to provide education at home to certain groups of people [3,4,5,6,7], suddenly became a general form of education and parents became accidental homeschoolers [8,9]
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. More answers to the questions were given by mothers (the questionnaire was completed by mothers for 661 students out of 738), which confirms the assumption that mothers are more involved in the provision of learning support In this situation, when parents had to become agents of accidental homeschooling [8,9], there are both benefits and various risks that need to be considered when planning postcrisis support to fill the education gap, as modeled in the World Bank study [18], where it was concluded that, depending on what kind of models are used to assess possible scenarios, there will be losses after a pandemic. Based on the data gathered during the pilot study, the steps of the research were developed for the research project mentioned
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